en
Written by John Egan for Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Construction of the first U.S. integrated carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) project is about 70% complete, on time and on budget, and is scheduled to become operational by October, an engineering manager with American Electric Power (NYSE:AEP) (Columbus, Ohio) told Industrial Info Resources.
The 20-megawatt (MW) project, which seeks to validate Alstom's (EPA:ALO) (Levallois-Perret, France) chilled ammonia carbon capture process, is located at AEP's 1,300-MW Mountaineer Power Station in New Haven, West Virginia. The project is expected to capture and sequester about 100,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually, a small fraction of the power plant's estimated annual emissions of 8.5 million metric tons of CO2.
Click on the image at right to see images of AEP's Mountaineer project.
"This will be the first-of-its-kind integration of a coal-fired generator with carbon capture and storage technology," said Gary Spitznogle, AEP's manager of IGCC and CCS engineering. AEP is spending about $73 million on the project; additional funding is being provided by Alstom and German utility RWE AG (OTC:RWEOY) (Essen, Germany).
"We chose Alstom's chilled ammonia carbon-capture process because it uses less energy and shows more promise" than the other leading post-combustion carbon-capture process, which uses amines to separate CO2 from the other flue gases, he said. The project will capture an estimated 90% of the CO2 in the flue gas it processes.
On a commercial scale, the chilled ammonia process is expected to impose a parasitic load of about 15% on the power plant while the amine-based process imposes a significantly higher parasitic load, perhaps 30%-40%, Mr. Spitznogle said. He added that the two processes have comparable construction costs. For projects in the pre-commercial stage, such as at Mountaineer, parasitic loads likely would be higher because the equipment has not been optimized, he said.
The project seeks to validate the chilled ammonia carbon-capture process developed by Alstom and first deployed last year on a demonstration basis at We Energies' Pleasant Prairie Generating Station in Wisconsin. That project, at 1.7 MW, captured an estimated 88%-90% of CO2 in the flue gas it processed, but it had no sequestration component.
"We know the chemistry to capture carbon dioxide works -- Pleasant Prairie showed that," Mr. Spitznogle said. "With the Mountaineer project we'll be finding out how efficiently we can sequester it in a geologic formation. Starting in October, we'll be in an 'inject and learn' mode." The Mountaineer project will include two on-site injection wells that will pump the CO2 into saline aquifers located more than 1 mile below the surface. A video overview of the project can be viewed on the AEP website: http://www.aep.com/environmental/climatechange/carboncapture.
As with any technology in a pre-commercial stage, the Mountaineer project "will have an extremely high cost -- that's the nature of any kind of demonstration or validation project," Mr. Spitznogle said. "But, as the industry found with flue gas desulfurization (scrubber) projects, the more we learned about the technology, the more the costs came down."
It could take several years to fully validate the technologies and processes involved in capturing and sequestering the CO2, he said. If the validation is successful, AEP has said it would build a commercial-scale CCS project at Mountaineer, which would be 200-250 MW and cost about $500 million.
A commercial-scale project of that size could capture about 1.25 million-1.5 million metric tons of CO2 per year, the AEP engineer said. This would be a new construction project, not an incremental addition to Mountaineer's validation facility.
"We have not made the decision to build a commercial-scale CCS project," he cautioned. "That decision, expected no earlier than late 2010, and probably a good bit after that, is 'absolutely contingent' on what AEP and its partners learn from the validation project," he said. "We are not committing to a commercialization project or a date."
In addition to requiring a lot of capital, CCS projects also require a lot of land. "On a per-megawatt basis, these projects have the same physical footprint as a power plant of that size: The 20-MW validation project requires as much land as a 20-MW power plant," the AEP engineer told IIR. "This is big stuff."
AEP spokeswoman Melissa McHenry added, "The industry still has a lot to learn about CCS. That's why we refer to this project as a 'validation.' Sequestration and monitoring of the carbon-dioxide plume is critical. We want to be sure that it stays where we expect it to stay."
The Mountaineer project is a small and expensive step forward in the effort to reduce utilities' CO2 emissions. AEP operates about 25,000 MW of coal-fired electric generation capacity. Its operating utilities burn about 76 million tons of coal each year. Last year, it emitted 148 million metric tons of CO2.
At this time, the costs of CCS, using either chilled ammonia or amine, is too expensive to make it the answer to the global CO2 challenge. CCS supporters see it as part of the solution, along with renewable energy, energy efficiency and possibly nuclear energy.
View Plant Profile - 1007247
Industrial Info Resources (IIR) is the leading provider of global market intelligence specializing in the industrial process, heavy manufacturing and energy related markets. For more than 26 years, Industrial Info has provided plant and project opportunity databases, market forecasts, high resolution maps, and daily industry news.
The 20-megawatt (MW) project, which seeks to validate Alstom's (EPA:ALO) (Levallois-Perret, France) chilled ammonia carbon capture process, is located at AEP's 1,300-MW Mountaineer Power Station in New Haven, West Virginia. The project is expected to capture and sequester about 100,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually, a small fraction of the power plant's estimated annual emissions of 8.5 million metric tons of CO2.
Click on the image at right to see images of AEP's Mountaineer project."This will be the first-of-its-kind integration of a coal-fired generator with carbon capture and storage technology," said Gary Spitznogle, AEP's manager of IGCC and CCS engineering. AEP is spending about $73 million on the project; additional funding is being provided by Alstom and German utility RWE AG (OTC:RWEOY) (Essen, Germany).
"We chose Alstom's chilled ammonia carbon-capture process because it uses less energy and shows more promise" than the other leading post-combustion carbon-capture process, which uses amines to separate CO2 from the other flue gases, he said. The project will capture an estimated 90% of the CO2 in the flue gas it processes.
On a commercial scale, the chilled ammonia process is expected to impose a parasitic load of about 15% on the power plant while the amine-based process imposes a significantly higher parasitic load, perhaps 30%-40%, Mr. Spitznogle said. He added that the two processes have comparable construction costs. For projects in the pre-commercial stage, such as at Mountaineer, parasitic loads likely would be higher because the equipment has not been optimized, he said.
The project seeks to validate the chilled ammonia carbon-capture process developed by Alstom and first deployed last year on a demonstration basis at We Energies' Pleasant Prairie Generating Station in Wisconsin. That project, at 1.7 MW, captured an estimated 88%-90% of CO2 in the flue gas it processed, but it had no sequestration component.
"We know the chemistry to capture carbon dioxide works -- Pleasant Prairie showed that," Mr. Spitznogle said. "With the Mountaineer project we'll be finding out how efficiently we can sequester it in a geologic formation. Starting in October, we'll be in an 'inject and learn' mode." The Mountaineer project will include two on-site injection wells that will pump the CO2 into saline aquifers located more than 1 mile below the surface. A video overview of the project can be viewed on the AEP website: http://www.aep.com/environmental/climatechange/carboncapture.
As with any technology in a pre-commercial stage, the Mountaineer project "will have an extremely high cost -- that's the nature of any kind of demonstration or validation project," Mr. Spitznogle said. "But, as the industry found with flue gas desulfurization (scrubber) projects, the more we learned about the technology, the more the costs came down."
It could take several years to fully validate the technologies and processes involved in capturing and sequestering the CO2, he said. If the validation is successful, AEP has said it would build a commercial-scale CCS project at Mountaineer, which would be 200-250 MW and cost about $500 million.
A commercial-scale project of that size could capture about 1.25 million-1.5 million metric tons of CO2 per year, the AEP engineer said. This would be a new construction project, not an incremental addition to Mountaineer's validation facility.
"We have not made the decision to build a commercial-scale CCS project," he cautioned. "That decision, expected no earlier than late 2010, and probably a good bit after that, is 'absolutely contingent' on what AEP and its partners learn from the validation project," he said. "We are not committing to a commercialization project or a date."
In addition to requiring a lot of capital, CCS projects also require a lot of land. "On a per-megawatt basis, these projects have the same physical footprint as a power plant of that size: The 20-MW validation project requires as much land as a 20-MW power plant," the AEP engineer told IIR. "This is big stuff."
AEP spokeswoman Melissa McHenry added, "The industry still has a lot to learn about CCS. That's why we refer to this project as a 'validation.' Sequestration and monitoring of the carbon-dioxide plume is critical. We want to be sure that it stays where we expect it to stay."
The Mountaineer project is a small and expensive step forward in the effort to reduce utilities' CO2 emissions. AEP operates about 25,000 MW of coal-fired electric generation capacity. Its operating utilities burn about 76 million tons of coal each year. Last year, it emitted 148 million metric tons of CO2.
At this time, the costs of CCS, using either chilled ammonia or amine, is too expensive to make it the answer to the global CO2 challenge. CCS supporters see it as part of the solution, along with renewable energy, energy efficiency and possibly nuclear energy.
View Plant Profile - 1007247
Industrial Info Resources (IIR) is the leading provider of global market intelligence specializing in the industrial process, heavy manufacturing and energy related markets. For more than 26 years, Industrial Info has provided plant and project opportunity databases, market forecasts, high resolution maps, and daily industry news.
